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Notes -
I don't know, I heard the same narrative about commercial air travel but the actual numbers are such that passenger deaths are basically flat even as passenger numbers continue increasing superlinearly. Given any particular case report, it's easy to stare into the abyss for too long and convince yourself that it represents a totally new excess of dysfunction and malfeasance, but as someone who has binge-read multiple writeups of almost every major plane crash in history my sense is that chains of absurd mistakes, coverups and ass-covering are the default and have been since we started keeping records.
On top of this, the American military, in particular, has been subjected to its own peculiar shift since the 90s (or even earlier) as its incentives drifted away from winning a peer war towards being a jobs programme and peacock tail for the American state. Your platforms don't need to be cheap for their supply chains to form a highly liquid way of allocating pork as part of political negotiations, and they don't need to be particularly safe and effective as long as they look cool and you can cover up any persuasive data that they might actually not do well in a war. Internally, there will never be a shortage of schmucks to show-fly Ospreys around Japan, no matter how often they crash or how unfairly the schmucks are blamed for the crashes (people do far more risky things for glory and thrills!). Therefore, the military has no reason to run a complex system that deploys safe airplanes, but this does not have to indicate that other parts of American society are incapable of doing that, or have gotten worse at building other complex systems.
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